Clan wars is just like any pub match where it is 15 vs 15 hot tank-on-tank action. However, all 15 combatants on each side must be from the same clan. This allows for some very special tactics as all 15 players coordinate and work as a team to dismantle their enemy. Gone are the days of pubbing where you simply drive to your favorite spot for the tank you’re playing and shoot shitty players that don’t know LMB is “fire”. Now you must coordinate where to concentrate your forces, focus fire tanks, and come in with a viable strategy for the particular side of the map you are playing. In the end, it boils down to shooting tanks, but to excel you must have great player discipline and competent commanders. Battles occur from around 1800 Eastern (#blameCuba) to 0000 Eastern, but usually a single clan’s battles are tightly grouped in the span of an hour or two.

Why should I play?

First off, it’s fun. After pubbing endlessly for thousands of battles it’s so nice to have 14 other players on your team who actually have brains. The strategy and competitiveness of the matches is really cool and the pace that many matches play at is mind boggling. Rarely Never in pubs do you ever have 10 vs 10 engagements where everyone is fighting to the death in a hyper-aggressive coordinated push. Finally, if your clan makes it on the map you can start earning gold that accumulates in a clan treasury until the commander decides to pay the soldiers. If you do well in clans wars you get free mad goaldz.

HOW DO I GET INVOLVED?

First off, it should be clarified that CW is unrestricted in tank choice. You can bring one tier 1, or 15 tier 10s. All loltraktors, or all E 100s. If you want to stand a chance, you had better bring a full team of tier 10s that most suit the map your clan is attacking/defending. This begs the question: what tanks are used frequently?

Grinding tier 10s

It’s a big day in any new(ish) tanker’s life when they buy their first tier ten. I clearly remember the happiness I felt scoring that mastery badge just 7 games in, so much so that I still have that screen cap from “back in the day” (about a year ago). If you just bought a tier 10 and you want to play clan wars… brace yourself. There’s a good chance you just bought a totally useless tier 10 from CW’s perspective. I know you just poured >2k games into one tank line and how ever many months (took me 13 months), but some tier 10s just aren’t good for clan wars. Sorry.

Used-all-the-fucking-time Tier

If your tier 10 is in this list, rejoice, as it is actually effective.

T57 Heavy Watch out for upcoming nerf. Could really hurt this tank, but no details are known yet.

T110E5

Conqueror Gun Carriage

E 100

Bat Chatillon 25t

IS-7

Obj. 140

Still-used-often-but-not-as-much-as-those-I-just-listed Tier

Don’t Fret, we still love you.

M53/M55

T110E3

WT auf E 100

IS-4

T-62A

STB-1

Leopard 1

Unique-tanks-that-are-both-strat-and-map-dependent Tier

You probably won’t be playing every night, but hey, tank locking is still a thing… so just maybe.

AMX 50 B Upcoming buff coupled with nerf of the T57 might make this swap places with the T57 (I sure hope so because the 50B is fucking awesome).

Now you’re playing once a week or less even if you show up every night.

FV215b (183) I think this is switching to the “Bless-your-heart Tier” in 9.2

JagdPanzer E 100

Foch 155

Obj. 268

Geschützwagen E 100

Bat Chat 155 58

Bless-your-heart Tier

I’m sorry if you ground out these tanks thinking you were going to play clan wars…

M48 Patton

T92

FV4202

Maus

Obj. 430 this is only here because it’s just a worse Obj. 140; will still get picked if you ‘need’ another Soviet medium

121

113

There you have it, every tier 10 listed out based on use. Now you can pick what you want to grind. But wait… if you own one of the most preferred tier 10s, why grind anything else?

TANK LOCKING

This is why. Every time you die in a CW battle where gold is at stake, your tank is unusable in another CW battle for a period of time. There are conditions that shorten the duration of a locked tank, but to be safe assume that any heavy that dies will be unusable for 7 days, any medium 6 days, and 5 days for a TD or artillery. This means if you’re are primarily a heavy tanker and you plan on playing one CW battle a night and die in said battle you’ll need 7 heavies to be able to play each night, and that’s a lot of tier 10s.

Tank locking is the motivating factor in top clans requiring many tier 10s from their players. If you can’t field 15 ideal tanks against a clan that can field a perfect team, you had better hope that your players’ skill or the clan’s strategy will be able to close the gap.

HOW TO FIND A CLAN THAT FITS YOUR SKILL LEVEL

I tried to create a skill based map of CW’s that is based on clans’ traditional stomping grounds. In this map green are the weakest clans (that still hold land on the map, mind you. “Weak” is a very relative term here) with yellow spanning the middle and red being the top dogs. Roughly these colors coordinate to these WN8 requirements:

Green- 1000-1500 WN8 overall

Yellow- 1500-2300 WN8 overall

Red- >2300 WN8 overall

So here’s what you do to find a fit for you:

Honestly evaluate your skill level. As I’ve said before, http://wotlabs.net/ will give you an honest opinion of your skill as a player. Go plug your name in and see what it tells you.

If you fall into one of these skill brackets, go start clicking on clans in that region on the global map.

If you find one that looks decent, go check them out on WoT CS. Check for issues in the player history like a mass exodus of players (>15 in the span of a few days) that may indicate internal stress of the clan. This could be a red flag.

Read up on that clan’s specific requirements and if you meet them hop on their teamspeak.

Talk with their commander or a recruiter and ask some questions about the clan, play in a few platoons, see if you fit in.

If this is all going swimmingly, then you should receive an invitation to join the clan on the main website.

If you’re not meeting the requirements of any clans currently on the map, look at what’s called a “landing zone” province somewhere in the green regions. A landing zone province is a location where your clan can compete in a miniature tournament to establish a stake on the global map. These look like bulls-eyes with an arrow pointing toward the middle. You might also see a red landing zone with a little fire symbol next to it, this is a riot zone. Riots occasionally happen on normal pieces of land that turn them into a one-day-only landing zone. This is a great way to establish a claim in a landlocked portion of the map without fighting your way there from a landing zone. Click riots and landing zones in the green regions of the map that I made and look who made it furthest in the tournament. Here is an example: You can see that The Devils Orphans [HELL] made it to the battle with the land owner before finally losing(For those of you with more CW experience, yes I realize Hell was clearing the LZ along with Alloy, but this was a high population LZ to show the process of an LZ tourney where the final battle did not end in a victory for the person challenging the land). This indicates that HELL was good, just not good enough. If you’re like HELL, where you’re getting good, but you’re not good enough, join a clan like that to get some clan wars experience under your belt. Usually clans that are on and off land have lower requirements than those that regularly hold land.

My recommendation is to always join the best clan that will let you in. Apply for 3 or 4 clans, one that you know for sure you can get into, one or two that you’re right at their requirements, and one that is just outside of your requirements. If you play in platoons with recruiters really well and aren’t a cunt sometimes you can get into clans that you otherwise could not.

Any IOC that isn’t IOC_5 and all 1000 ARMED subclans. There are others I would personally avoid including, but not limited to, REBEL and _HOT_ that have demonstrated outstanding shitlordiness on multiple occasions, but I’m not going to list out all the clans I personally hate.

Out growing a clan

If you joined a clan and continued to improve as a player to the point where it feels like your clan mates are holding you back in clan wars, it might be time to move on. Just let your commander know why you’ve decided to leave and press the big, scary leave clan button. Start the process of looking for a clan once more, possibly this time utilizing WoTcs’s ranking system to see the difference in clans. Find your old clan, jump up some ranks, and look for a new clan with a higher score and higher requirements. This is easy to fall into a grey zone of mid-tier clans, but WoTcs really helps sort out the noise and lets you find the clan you want to be a part of.

HOW TO MAKE YOURSELF AN APPEALING APPLICANT

I can’t believe I’m encouraging this… but pad your stats. If you’re shooting for that dream clan, take a few hundred battles to really focus on bringing your WN8 up. Don’t grind stock tanks, play tier 10s you’re good at, bring your damage up on said tens along with win rate (platoon). In addition to this, make sure you have lots of preferred tier 10s and good damage in those tier 10s. You’re a serious contender to get in a respected clan if you can deal 2.2k in an arty, 2.5k in a medium, 2.7k in a heavy, or 3k in a TD and your WN8 should reflect this if you play these tiers for a while. For all but top tier clans, your bread and butter is your 1000 battle WN8/win rate. Usually when things start to click, they click fast and overall stats can’t respond fast enough to show this improvement in player skill, so clans look to recent statistics for this information.

If you’re just starting out in CW just get some experience under your belt. No one wants to take a player who has 0 CW experience into an important fight if they can afford not to, but a lot of smaller clans need every warm body they can find and are happy to give you the experience you need.

ACTUALLY PLAYING CLAN WARS

15 minutes before the battle begins you will see a Special Battles bar appear at the bottom of your screen. At this point you should be in teamspeak with your clan in the clan wars channel where the commander will present the strategy to the players and request specific tanks from specific players to form the best possible team that he can. Everyone makes sure their “clan wars load-outs” are on (gold rounds, large consumables, etc) and you head into battle when the timer hits 0. You’ll now encounter the enemy on a predetermined map, on a predetermined side, with tanks your commander chose by hand… But where are their tanks? Clan wars implements a feature called fog of war that does not allow you to see the enemy tank composition until they have been spotted in battle. This is to prevent countering a strategy that relies on surprise, such as 15 mediums rushing straight down a flank. You have to spot your enemy to determine what his plans for the battle are.

In-game player responsibilities

Call out important information, like where the artillery shells are coming from, not every fucking time you get detracked.

Focus fire. Remove guns from the game as fast as possible. In a 5 v 5 E 100 brawl, shoot the 1 HP E 100, not the 2700 HP one. A gun is still a gun until it’s dead.

Share HP. HP is a resource, use it to keep guns on the field. If the lead tank in a push gets beat to shit, cycle him to the back of the push. Keep tanks in the fight as long as possible. Again, a gun is still a gun until it’s dead.

Hit your fucking shots.

Follow orders, but realize that your commander can’t play 15 tanks at once. If you see an opportunity or any situation that needs a fast judgment call, use your own brain–to an extent. Micromanaging is beneficial in weaker clans where the players cannot make complex judgement calls on the fly in a high stress situation, but in experienced clans the commander is a guiding force, not an infallible god.

Fulfill your role in the strategy. If you’re a scout, then scout. If you’re a punching bag, then get out there and use that armor. If you’re bait, then be the fucking bait. Don’t whine and bitch to your commander about how you’re not getting enough damage in CW. Clan wars is about winning, not individual performance.

NOTES

Many clans are part of larger conglomerates that make inter-alliance transfers much easier. For example, OTTER is part of PetCo which includes clans such as PBKAC, BADGR, FOXEY, PUPEH, and BUNEH where each clan has its own requirements to join, but transferring from BUNEH to FOXEY would be much easier than just applying to FOXEY as the commanders of BUNEH know the commanders of FOXEY well and would tell them all about you. Assuming you’re not a cunt (notice how that gets you places) your former commander would probably put in a good word for you and the transfer would be seamless.

Leaving and joining a new clan has a 48 hour cool down so you can’t just join a different clan each night for clan wars.

Don’t wardec G
See: PURPL

Pretty much everything else is the responsibility of the battle caller or clan commander. Being a soldier is pretty stress-free. I haven’t included much information on how to run a clan such as chip movement and riot suppression because this guide is a player’s guide.

I’m sure I missed some key portion of information, but I’m running low on my character count. If you find a gap in this guide, mention something in the comments and I’ll either try to squeeze it in or just upvote you so that people can see the information anyway.

I hope this guide was helpful as CW can be pretty tricky to an inexperienced player